Leading vs Following and The Buckley Rule

February 13, 2013

Thoughts on the Buckley Rule via NRO – link below. For all the back and forth, this really is about leading versus following. For the most part, the GOP is all too happy to follow the media and every other institution toward the Left. It wants to be popular and, consequently, powerful more than anything else.

Conservatives want more. They want to protect and defend ideals. Sure, it can be more complex than that – but that is the dynamic at the heart of all this current fighting across the Right.

Policy failures, as usually understood, mean nothing to the Democrat party because successes or failures are not relevant to the rationale behind those policies. Policies initiated by Democrats are intended first and foremost to cement the place and power of Democrats in the American polity. As I pointed out awhile back, all the post-election talk about what Obama’s second agenda would be (energy? jobs? foreign policy? and so on) was meaningless since there would be one and only one second-term agenda for this president:

… to eliminate political and economic competition to himself first and the Democrat party second. There is no other Obama agenda. Not jobs, not economic growth, not anything. Emplacing permanent one-party rule in this country is the sole goal for term 2.

There is nothing that will sidetrack him and the rest of the party from this goal. Increasing unemployment won’t, nor North Korean nuclear tests, nor a weakening dollar, nor anything else.

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, Judicial Watch has compelled the powers-that-be to cough up the video of one self-described citizen of the world (Thomas Betances) conducting government-approved, government-sponsored, government funded racial harassment (i.e., “cultural sensitivity training”) at the United States Department of Agriculture. It took the USDA eight months to cough it up, but it was worth waiting for.

Gary Cohen, the director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, testified before the Senate Finance Committee, and the Democrats on the committee—from its Chairman Max Baucus to Senators Ron Wyden, Bill Nelson, and Maria Cantwell—tore into him. . . .

The about-face of these Democrats is a phenomenon worth pausing over. Many formerly supportive constituencies have grown wary of Obamacare in recent weeks as we’ve learned more about the effects it will have on the health care system. But these Senators’ 180-degree turns are something more severe.

The fate of the Democratic party in America over the next decade is tied to Obama’s healthcare reform. If it is seen to be a success, America could trend Democratic for the foreseeable future. If it fails, liberalism as we’ve known it will take a massive hit. But, so far, support for Obamacare has been waning instead of waxing. Even a recent piece by Talking Points Memo that placed the blame for Obamacare’s potential failure on Republicans noted that the law’s unpopularity with the public at large was the number one threat to its success. Democrats are getting nervous and consequently are trying to put some distance between themselves and the ACA.